What’s an authentic way to help immigrants tell their stories to an audience? How about asking them to learn a technique that is as alien to them as America once was: puppetry?

“Puppets are a new thing, a foreign thing to them, but this experience feels like a confirmation of what puppetry can be,” says puppet and theater artist Masanari Kawahara, talking about “Immigrant Journey Project,” which opens Friday.

They all created a show that lets community members — many of whom had never performed before — use puppets to share their stories of immigration.

There are dozens of stories in the hour-long show, including:

Pang Chang, a famous singer in Laos, creating a puppet version of her younger self so she can talk about the career that eluded her.

Young people from the now-defunct Shades of Yellow, a Hmong LGBTQ group, who looked to the past because stories in their present felt too painful.

Residents of Hmong Elders Center, who reflect on the difficulties of dating in a refugee center.

(The other three groups involved are Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, Wilder Foundation and Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment.)

“I was curious to see how they would feel about telling their stories through puppetry,” Kawahara says. An initial workshop, in which community members made crude puppets, felt successful, he adds, but like the stakes needed to be higher.

“Then, this year, I asked them to make the actual puppets for the show and they started to realize, ‘Oh, I am making myself.’ There’s an investment in that, in creating a kind of mini-me. And it really was so beautiful, especially among the Hmong elders, who have this tradition of hand-sewing and embroidery. They spent a lot of time making costumes for the puppets and they are amazing.”

“I was thinking about: How can we get community members who are not performers, necessarily, to be part of a show and feel confident and successful, especially since there are some language barriers?” recalls Reyes, who has worked with puppets as an actor but is directing them for the first time. “And also: How do you tell authentic stories in a responsible way, from immigrants or refugees or anyone in a marginalized community? The results have been beyond my expectations.”

Same goes for the performers. One of them, Khin Oo, says, “All of our puppets are so fantastical. I feel like they kind of reflect the sometimes-surreal experience of being Asian and an immigrant.”

The surreal nature of the performing experience may come from the tension between the distance created by manipulating an inanimate object and the intimacy of moving a puppet that is a representation of one’s self.

“In our brains, we know it’s not a human. It’s a puppet. But, once we bring it to life, we are using our imaginations and filling in all the things a puppet can’t do,” Reyes says. “The puppet gives a suggestion of speaking or walking or moving and it’s not really doing those things, but we fill them in.

“There’s a part in one story that says, ‘The character grows wings and flies.’ In a regular production, you’d be like, ‘Oh, no. Do we have cables? Can we afford this?’ Well, here, Masa made wings and the puppeteer lifted it off the table and it flew. The possibilities are amazing. What a puppet can do goes beyond what a human can do,” says Reyes, sounding very much like a person who has more puppets in his future.

Reyes says it was exciting to see, for instance, the Hmong elders realize the possibilities of their puppets. But turning them into puppeteers was not a slam-dunk, partly because the creators also had to grapple with superstitions.

“In their culture, sometimes dolls become possessed and they have to get rid of them,” says Reyes, who was not aware of that belief going into the project. “We were doing a workshop at the Hmong Elders Center and they showed us this doll they were going to burn or destroy because they believed it was possessed. It was one of those baby dolls that, when you lay it down, the eyes close and when you lift it, they open again.”

That sort of identification with an inanimate object is very much like the act of imagination that makes theatergoers believe in a puppet performance, says Kawahara.

“On top of that, a lot of the stories in the show — all of them, actually — are the stories of the performers. So they made puppets of themselves, either when they were young or in the present. It’s very poignant, very powerful, to see a puppet that looks like the puppeteer who is manipulating it,” Kawahara says.

Like Reyes, Kawahara was moved by how adept the puppeteers, both the performers and the non-performers, became.

“One girl, particularly, is just so natural as a puppeteer. She completely understood what we were asking her to do, how the puppeteer has to be quiet and let a lot of the emotion come through the puppet,” Kawahara says. “Randy and I would look at each other in amazement. Some people just have it.”

For Kawahara, some of that amazement may come from the fact that — like many of the performers in the piece (which includes 23 puppets, 10 community members and four Mu performers) — he is a first-generation American, with his own immigrant journey stories.

“We’re looking at a generation of immigrants, mostly of Asian descent, and I am one of them,” says Kawahara, who applied for citizenship earlier this year. “I identify myself as Japanese but, now, I’m becoming American, so I wanted to help them bring their stories on stage. They are under-represented. They are American, yes, but some of them are like myself: new immigrants who are struggling to root themselves in the soil.”

Reyes’ organization, Mu, has been telling stories about people trying to put down roots for 25 years, but he says puppets have been a revelation.

“There’s a gardening scene where the Hmong elders come out and, at first, we’re thinking, ‘We probably need to make some tools,’ but we worked on the scene and the Hmong elders were just miming the gardening with their puppets and we said, ‘That looks amazing. We don’t even need tools,’ ” Reyes says. “So, it always felt like, ‘How do we do this? What else do we need?’ and the puppets would do something and we would realize, ‘That says it all.’ ”

In other words, “Immigrant Journey Project” was designed to tell stories about immigrants, about their dreams, their challenges and their roots. And, sometimes, the puppets helped them see that they can fly.

IF YOU GO

Chris Hewitt was the Pioneer Press movie critic and then an arts and entertainment reporter from 1993 to 2017.

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